It's been a while since my last update. In that time, I've been working on a few projects here in there. As for MEGA_MATRIX, I've added support for the Arduino MEGA and have been able to do a few proof of concept stuff for the Raspberry Pi. The Pi version right now can get a whopping 20K FPS in the native C version! The Pi version isn't too functional right now, but expect soon enough. Link to source on GitHub.

Since the end of the summer, I've been working on my own Animation tool. It's not much right now, but you can find Linux and OS X binaries right over here. Here's the first thing I was able to make with it, a bouncing ball:

Hey, I'm still alive here.

I meant to post something back in March, but I was quite busy with school. I've been off for a month now; mainly just have been decompressing. Went camping up in the Adirondacks which was a lot of fun, but mainly was just catching up on all the Burn Notice I've missed since starting college. One of the main things I did for this site was move it over from a Raspberry Pi running in the corner of my apartment over to this "cloud," thingy. It was fun while it lasted.

As for my projects, I've had to put the coffee machine on hiatus and I've added some more features and changes to the CHIP-8 emulator. I've got something else (much smaller) in the works right now. You can expect a post on each soon enough.

I meant to post this about a month ago, but I've been quite busy.  Anyways...

I mentioned in the last post that I was working on a Chip-8 Emulator.  While it was a quite interesting project and I learned a lot from it, I decided to discontinue the project a month ago.  My reasons were that I hadn't spend time on it in a bit (it was supposed to be a short 2-3 week project), but school work caught up with me and interrupted any progress.  I did a fair amount of reasearch on the Chip-8 architecture and got some (but not all ROMs to work).

For the project, I wrote a small python utility to print out the data of a ROM (insanely useful for implementing op-codes).  The brunt of the code was made with C and SDL.  It started out using the 1.2 version of SDL, then SDL2 came out right after development began.  In the late stages of the project, I thought it would be interesting to switch to the new API.  It went smoothly.  Sound/Audio (which is just a "beep," noise) isn't implemented.

But in retrospect, I got out of it what I wanted to learn; "How does an emulator work?"  It was a worthwhile experience for the time I put into it.  I'd love to acutally work on a different (more purposeful) type of emulator.  But for now, I've got some other stuff that I need to get done.

If anyone wants to see it, I posted it to my Github page under c8_sdl. It's released under the GNU GPL v3 license.

So I haven't updated this at all in about a month. The main reason is that I've been busy both with my internship and my personal project.  For the later, there has been a lot of reading involved (most of which I don't even use).  But it's all beneficial.

I just got done with the basic testing phase for my personal project, and now I'm refacorting most of that code for release of it.  I hope to have it ready this weekend.   Most of my work for it probably will be documenting it and writing examples.

What is it about you ask?  Serial communications.  It's actually an older project (built at a 10 hour hackathon,) that I wanted to improve and extend it.  You'll see it soon on Github.